I didn't tell my mom or Les about what Bret had told me, even though I talk to them about almost everything. I know what they'd say, if I did tell them. My mom would say, "Why would you get yourself worked up over a boy who's not even done yet and is about as useless as t.i.ts on a boar-hog?" And Les would jump in with, "He's an a.s.shole! In my day, if I had a girl, I would call her every day, and if I couldn't call, I'd mail a G.o.dd.a.m.n letter!"

I don't think I could make my parents understand that I'm not crying over a boy. Not exactly. I am crying because of all this wasted time. My whole life so far, all fifteen years of it-just wasted time.

Vera blinked at that last paragraph. The phrase wasted time made her think of Sufia Ahmed-the waste of a young life, as the cliche would have it-and she wiped this out of her mind as fast as she could, like someone swatting at a fly, looking up at her former student's smiling picture for forgiveness.

It was funny, Vera mused; Jensen Willard had complained in a journal entry that her peers were oblivious to tragedy and heartache, but Jensen was not so different-her tragedy seemed exasperatingly small compared to what Vera had seen in the earliest hours of Sat.u.r.day morning. Still, her heart went out to her student, who presumably had written this entry before she had known of Sufia's death. Her pain was still real, no matter what its cause, and deserved to be dignified with a response. She read the journal entry a second time, then a third time, and then she remembered more of how she had felt after she'd read Jensen's last journal entry-the annoyance she'd felt at Bret Folger and at thickheaded boys of his ilk. And then she knew exactly why it bothered her-the reasons she had not wanted to consider, the stories she had deliberately refrained from telling Jensen before.

In a split-second decision, Vera hit the reply b.u.t.ton and felt her fingers flying over the keyboard, hammering at the keys until they shook: Dear Jensen, I found your last journal entry far from stupid, so please do not worry about what I thought of it. My only objection to reading that entry is that your boyfriend, Bret, does not seem as sensitive to your needs as I would wish for you. Hearing about your relationship reminds me a little of how things were with my own first boyfriend. It may or may not be helpful for me to tell you something about this. I can tell you that I was seventeen at the time and that my first boyfriend's name was Peter. Many years later, he became my fiance. A few years after that, he became my ex. Before he was mine, he was the boyfriend of a girl named Heidi Duplessis. But that is a separate story, perhaps one for a different time.

Peter and I went to the same high school in Bond Brook, but had never spoken-kind of like you and Bret in the French cla.s.s. I was shy, so painfully shy in those days that other students made fun of me, asked me if I was deaf and dumb, made goading comments in study halls while the teachers looked the other way. But Peter was someone I had noticed. I liked his pale, bleached white-blond hair that fell in a swoop over his forehead-its natural color was a medium brown-his short, compact body, and his black trench coat that flapped theatrically around his ankles when he walked. I liked the way he bounced on his the b.a.l.l.s of his feet and the way his voice cut through the din of the halls. He was often smiling, but his eyes seldom smiled; they were an almost silvery blue, a color so seldom seen in nature that it was impossible to detect any warmth in them. In a diary I'd kept at the time-I'm embarra.s.sed to even think about this diary-I included Peter in a list of "10 Boys I Would Like to Date," with an explanation of why next to each person's name. Next to Peter's name I wrote, "He seems like a very unique kind of boy."

But as I said, Peter never noticed me in high school. He went to Temple University after graduation, and we didn't start dating until we ran into each other during his Thanksgiving break. By that time he'd heard some things about me, things that weren't so nice, but still somehow we clicked.

On our first date, we went to a nightclub in Portland that had chem-free dance nights twice a week; the nightclub was like nothing I'd seen in Bond Brook, and I instantly fell in love with it.

Jensen, I wish such a club was still around for you. Zuzu's was the name of it, and it was the place to go if you were a disaffected boy who wore makeup or a disaffected girl with a shaved head. This was the place to go if you were a pale, scrawny girl with Cleopatra eyes and a short dress and a pair of boots with four-inch soles; it was also the place to go if you were a great big girl spilling out of your corset, a crucifix nestled in your cleavage. Girls like this came from small schools all over Maine and had names like Scheherazade and Cymbeline. On the dance floor you could view hunchbacked kids, praying mantis kids, midget kids who moved like Tasmanian devils; some did leaps that raised them several feet in the air-you'd think they were figure skaters doing triple axels, but with flailing gestures added for dramatic effect. You should have seen them! There was one girl who always wore a white latex bodysuit and danced like she was fighting off a swarm of bees! I didn't dance at all, and I half hated, half admired these kids' wanton exhibitionism; I'd just sit with Peter at the back of the club, sometimes even sitting on the floor with our backs up against the wall, with the thump of the speakers catching my heart up and tossing it cruelly around. The DJ spun songs by the Cure ("Boys Don't Cry"), the Smiths ("Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"), and Siouxsie and the Banshees ("Cities in Dust"). During a lull, a slow song that just about cleared the dance floor, I felt a cool hand over mine. Peter's. I looked at him sideways and saw a sheen in his silvery eyes that might have been emotion.

After that, Zuzu's was always our place.

I am sure you are wondering at this point why I am telling you this. I am telling you this because I think perhaps you will have some understanding of what I experienced.

Over the remaining weeks of Peter's break, we saw each other every day. I went from being a girl who couldn't even speak to a boy to a girl who could have endless conversations with a boy while in bed with him, arms wrapped fiercely around him. I remember rolling around on the floor of his house while the hot air blew in through vents on the floor, tickling us. I remember him being so thin that his pelvic bones hurt me when we had s.e.x-that was what Peter called it, "having s.e.x," though I secretly thought that "making love" sounded nicer. Maybe it's just as well that you and Bret aren't doing all that. The word love was never used between us, but on those nights at Peter's house when we lay together-his mother was somehow never home-he would say, "I need you." And I believed that he did. I had never felt needed before, except maybe as my parents' daughter. I'd never felt anything other than laughable or expendable to someone close to my own age.

Vera stopped typing, aghast. What was she doing? She did not need to disclose all this to Jensen. She doubted the girl would even want to hear about her teacher in this context; what student would? Yet there was part of her that wished to go on, to tell her about how, when Peter had gone back to college halfway across the country, something inside Vera broke. She wanted to tell her how she had written feverishly to him every day-topping Jensen's four or five letters a week to Bret-and how Peter wrote her letters in return, packets filled with clippings and comic strips and things he thought might amuse her. She wanted to describe how she had torn into these envelopes, tossing aside all the clippings to find what she really wanted-the letters, the words, some sc.r.a.p of affection in writing. A simple "I need you, Vera" or "I miss you" had made her weep with relief.

After a hot, full, indolent summer together, when Peter was preparing to return to school for his soph.o.m.ore year, he told Vera he thought she was too intense. That it might be best if they started seeing other people-and then, she presumed, he had gone on to do exactly that, for they didn't speak again for another fourteen years.

In the interim, her life had not ended, as she had once guessed it might. She had gone on to do other things-things she was sometimes even proud of, which she supposed could be said of almost anyone's life. Her life so far had been a series of peaks and valleys, steps forward and steps backward, with her graduate school experience and time in New York City being the highlight. She had had other relationships of a sort, but nothing that took. Ending up back in Bond Brook because of Peter just seemed like a hiccup in retrospect, an interruption of the good path she'd been on. She would never make such a mistake again. When she thought of Peter and his new fiancee, Betsy, all she could think was: Betsy will never know the skinny, white-haired, silver-eyed boy with the trench coat flapping like bat wings around his heels. She would know someone quite different. She was lucky, Vera thought, to know something quite different-to not be lured back by the false promise of having teenage love softened and made right.

Vera realized she was crying a little, the cursor still blinking near the text of her unfinished email. The blinking seemed disapproving, impatient; it made her wipe her eyes and delete the email she'd started, word by word. When the screen was empty, she started anew, her mouth set in a resolute line.

Hi Jensen- It's fine that you didn't turn in more entries, as you have already gone above and beyond the call of duty by turning in so many pages early and writing them in such a thoughtful, original way. I'm looking forward to seeing more from you. And I agree-writing does help with difficult times. Try to enjoy the rest of your time off, and I will see you in cla.s.s soon.

Sincerely, Vera Lundy * * *

School resumed on Thursday morning, the day after Sufia Ahmed's memorial service. Vera had already put some thought into how she would address her girls when they came into her morning cla.s.s; she had not spoken to them directly since before the tragedy. They would be expecting something from her, she knew. They would be looking to her and all the other adults at Wallace for cues of how to behave, how to carry on.

To Vera's utter lack of surprise, most of the girls looked red-eyed, weary, and beaten down as they took their seats. She found that the comments she had rehea.r.s.ed in her mind-the boilerplate script about loss and coping that Lucy Grivois had suggested all faculty deliver to their students-simply would not do.

"Tough times," Vera said quietly when it seemed that the last of the girls had come in. "Tough times indeed."

Jamie Friedman nodded at Vera, meeting her gaze in such an adult way that Vera felt an understanding pa.s.s between them. We're the grown-ups here, the gaze seemed to say, and Vera did not object to this idea at all. She was not sure she was up to the task of being the only grown-up in the room.

"Do you guys want to talk about things?" Vera asked, looking from girl to girl. "Or are you all talked out?"

"All talked out," Autumn Fullerton said wearily, fiddling with her hair.

Loo Garippa nodded in agreement. "No one's telling us anything anyway," she said.

Vera stole a glance at Chelsea Cutler, whose eyes, though focused on Vera, gave away nothing. Had anyone told her anything? "I don't think there's much to be told at this point," Vera said to the girls. "There's some . . . there's some really sick people out there in society. That's the only absolute fact we have to work on. And it will be hard-it will be hard to grasp that Sufia won't be with us anymore."

It was then that Jensen Willard came in, dragging her army knapsack by its strap. There was a grayish pallor to her skin, and she carried herself more stiffly than usual, as though her joints pained her. She took her place at the long table near the back. Normally, she sat one seat away from Sufia Ahmed, with one empty chair in between them. Now two empty chairs stood between her and her closest cla.s.smate, Aggie. In the small cla.s.sroom, these two empty seats seemed a wide gulf separating Jensen from the rest of the girls. Vera found her eyes resting on the seat that had been Sufia's.

Suddenly the dead girl's face appeared before her again-wide-eyed, doleful, accusatory. Vera looked out at the eleven students sitting at the tables and felt something awful beginning to happen within her body, a hideous and rapid metamorphosis. A great, swollen, bloated thing-panic, she thought-was bobbing up from her chest to her throat like some gaseous old body in a swamp. Vera carefully sat down on the edge of the table at the front of the room, not trusting her legs to hold her steady, and at that exact moment Jamie Friedman cleared her throat. "I would like to say something, Miss Lundy."

"Please do, Jamie."

"I just wanted to share a memory I had of Sufia. I think sometimes the best way to deal with sadness is to remember something good."

"Oh, I think that's a beautiful thought. I think that's very wise." And Vera really did think it was, although beauty seemed far away from her right now; her voice, she realized, sounded as though she were being strangled. Just thinking that made her breath come more shallowly, and she held her elbows closer at her side so that her arms would not twitch. There was something comforting about this; she felt as though her arms were holding her rib cage in place, keeping its contents from spilling out.

"I'll always remember Sufia's lunches," Jamie said. "They always smelled good, and if you asked her what she was eating, she was always willing to share some of it. It was because of her that I first tried sambuusas."

Vera thought of sambuca, the liqueur. But then Cecily-Anne said, "Ohhhh, are those like samosas?"

"Yes, but better. The spices are different."

Aggie Hamada raised her hand. "I think it would be nice if we all shared a memory of Sufia. I have one I'd like to share."

The twitch had begun to settle into Vera's lips and into the muscles of her cheeks. She listened as Jamie told a story of how Sufia had been a valuable member of the debate team. "Mrs. Fortunato-the debate coach-used to call her our secret weapon," she said, "because she stuck by her beliefs and always let her argument unfold in a . . . patient way."

The other girls began to add to the stories. Soon, almost everyone had something they remembered: the extra pens Sufia always carried, in many colored inks, which she willingly lent to girls who'd lost or forgotten their own; Sufia's laugh, which was rare but delightful, making her whole body shake from head to toe.

"These are such lovely memories," Vera said when the stories began to dwindle. She was sure at this point that her students could see her tremors, and she thought that a couple of them were even looking at her with a mixture of revulsion and concern. Jensen Willard in particular was looking at her with what Vera thought might be sympathy, in her pale, gray, watchful way. Vera realized that Jensen was the only girl who had not shared a story about Sufia. "Anyone else?" she said, fixing her gaze on the girl. "Anyone else who has a memory to speak of?"

Just as she could have predicted, Jensen Willard pressed her lips together and shook her head.

Vera looked at the clock. There were still forty-five minutes left of cla.s.s time. She had planned to allocate some of the day's cla.s.s time to a discussion of The Catcher in the Rye, but Vera knew that talking about Holden Caulfield's slow disintegration and denial of the same were not the right topics to take on just now. "Let's do something a little different today," she said, her lips still twitching. "Poetry. I don't think you'll mind taking a little break from Catcher for a day or two, will you? Take out your literature anthologies and turn to page 646. Richard Wilbur, 'The Beautiful Changes.'"

Not budging from her perch on the table, Vera let students monopolize the discussion of the poem, interjecting very little herself; she even let Martha True read it aloud, in her girlish, quavery voice. In the remaining cla.s.s time, she asked students to start drafting poems of their own. "You can write about loss if you'd like," Vera said, "or about sorrow. Or, if you don't want to, you don't have to write about those things."

As was often the case, she was rather amazed when they obeyed her. She still had not gotten used to the fact that she could say something like "Everyone start writing a poem," and everyone would actually do so. But her girls were essentially still children, and children were obedient creatures. As the girls frowned and scribbled and frowned some more, Vera thought they even looked childlike; the tip of Kelsey Smith's tongue protruded from her lips, making her look like an earnest toddler crafting a painting, while Jensen Willard's tousled cap of hair fell in her face as she started working out her first lines. Vera took this opportunity to sit quietly and feel the panic ebb out of her. When the last of the tremors had ebbed away, she felt weakened all over, as though she'd been run over by a truck.

Once the exercise was finished, Harmony Phelps said, "Are we going to get our journals back today?"

"Oh," Vera said, jumping up off the table, "I do have them. Thank you for reminding me."

She reserved a minute at the end of cla.s.s to hand back students' journals, fully expecting that the girls would head for the door as soon as they received them. Instead, each girl sat with her journal just as Jensen had a few days prior, taking time to read Vera's handwritten feedback. For a moment she felt simultaneously fl.u.s.tered, pleased, and self-conscious, adding to the mental confusion she already felt; then she realized they were probably just subdued, rather than entranced by her comments.

The girls finally started to leave. Aggie Hamada said "Have a nice day" as she pa.s.sed. Katherine "Kitty" a.r.s.enault, one of Vera's most reticent students, called out "See you tomorrow!" on her way out. It proved to Vera what she had seen play out time and again in other cla.s.ses she'd taught: You could stand before a cla.s.s all day long and exchange ideas till you were blue in the face, but there was no greater bond to be formed than when grief and vulnerability were shared. That's where she liked to think their sudden kindness came from, anyway; she didn't like to think that they just felt sorry for her.

Her strength regained, Vera stood up and called out, "Jensen? Could I speak to you for a second?" just as the girl was lifting herself arthritically out of her seat.

Jensen did as she was asked, and Vera could see that the whites around her amber eyes had a yellowish look that she'd never noticed before. It occurred to her that the girl might not be getting enough sleep. And no wonder, given all that was going on lately. "Are you doing okay?" she asked.

"I'm doing all right. Why?"

"I know from your journal entry that you're going through a little bit of a rough time, that's all. And then, well . . . there's Sufia."

The girl shrugged. "Are you okay?" she asked Vera.

Vera took this as a jab at her visible nervousness in the cla.s.sroom. Even if the question was well-meaning, coming from a place of genuine concern, she had no intention of answering it. "I'm fine. Listen, while I've got you up here, there's something else I want to ask of you. Could you please make an effort to be on time from now on? Cla.s.s begins promptly at eight o'clock. Everyone else is on time, so it's only fair that you are, too. I know maybe this is a funny time to bring that up, but I've been meaning to mention it for a while."

"Okay. I can make an effort."

"I'd appreciate that."

"I'm sorry I'm a little late sometimes. I have to motivate a little bit before I get from cla.s.s to cla.s.s. But did you know this is my favorite cla.s.s?"

"Is it? Thank you." Vera hadn't been expecting that. She felt herself blushing at the compliment and feeling ludicrous for doing so.

"You're welcome. It's nice of you to put up with me and read all my writing."

"I worry a bit, that's all. It's not a question of putting up with you."

Then Jensen said something that nearly floored Vera. "It must have been awful for whoever found Sufia in the park like that."

"Yes," Vera said. "I'm sure it was."

"I wonder what she looked like. I mean, being dead and all."

Her chest tightening again, Vera said, "I don't feel quite comfortable with this line of discussion."

"You know what else? I heard that her boyfriend did it."

"Where did you hear that from? Chelsea Cutler, maybe?"

"Just around." Jensen's lips moved in something as close to a smile as Vera had ever seen from her. "I have to go to French now," the girl said. "Bye." She turned on her heels, dragging her knapsack behind her in a clatter of buckles.

Uneasily, Vera watched her go, until the clattering grew fainter and fainter down the corridor outside her cla.s.sroom door.

The rest of Vera's cla.s.ses were better. Though she now felt foolish for moving into a poetry unit, she repeated the morning's discussion with her last two sections, not wanting one group to get ahead of the other in their Catcher readings. When cla.s.ses were over, Sue MacMasters stopped her outside the door of the faculty lounge with another invitation to meet up with the English teachers for tomorrow's lunch. The underlying purpose of this, Vera knew, was for the group to commiserate about Sufia Ahmed. Vera was tempted to say she was so bogged down in paperwork she couldn't possibly join them, but she knew the solemnity of recent events required her presence. Besides, these faculty lunches, though still strained, were getting a little easier for her. She had now met informally with the English faculty three times, and each lunch period had been a little less painful than the one before. They weren't a bad group of women on the whole, Vera had to remind herself during those seemingly protracted forty-five-minute lunches. They were well-meaning, and they seemed as though they accepted her, or were at least getting used to her quiet, standoffish ways.

Once Sue was gone, Vera went inside the lounge to check her mailbox. She sorted through a few memos, threw out a postcard one shamelessly self-promoting faculty member had distributed to advertise her pottery exhibit, and retrieved one short, typed doc.u.ment that looked like a student essay, though it had no name or t.i.tle at the top. She looked at it, flinched, and looked at it again, first checking around the room to make sure no one else was with her.

I'm still thinking about Sufia. I can't help it. And I can't help wondering about you. It seems this is really getting to you.

One has to wonder about someone who just goes waltzing through the park at two or three in the morning and why she would be there to begin with. What did this person think when she first saw Sufia? I've read accounts from other people who've stumbled across dead bodies and how they thought they were seeing a department store mannequin or a doll. Is that what this person thought?

I've been reading all the articles about Sufia I can find-mostly the same one, reprinted over and over in different papers. It feels like Angela Galvez all over again, doesn't it?

If I'm being completely honest, I'm jealous of both of them-both these dead girls. Not because of the attention, but because they got away. I wish it was that easy for me to escape. Sometimes I like to think of death as an adventure, a retreat. It would be the nicest vacation I'd ever have, and the best part would be that it wouldn't have to end.

Think of it: No more worrying about being disappointed. No more worrying about disappointing other people. No more trying to impress people who I can't even impress. And I suppose this is the very definition of egotistical, but I can't help wondering what people would say about me once I was gone-would anyone miss me? Would Bret? Or would I just continue to be that whispered-about weird girl doing another weird thing, the weird thing to end all weird things?

How nice it would be to just die for a little while and come back when the coast is clear. But I don't think it happens that way. Even if I believed in life after death, which I'm not sure I do, there would be no guarantee that we could come back when we felt ready; we would have to come back at somebody else's whim. I wonder if Angela and Sufia are going to come back. Maybe they already have. Maybe they're already here-right here beside you, in the room you're standing in now, just waiting for you to notice them.

Vera, having read the last line, whirled around as though expecting someone to have crept up behind her. There was no one there. Her hands had begun to tremble again, causing the typed pages to rattle, and she sought out the cubicle in which the school secretary, Eileen, worked.

"Eileen?" she said. "Did a student drop off a paper for you to put in my box? A short, dark-haired girl?"

"No," said Eileen, a salty young woman who seemed years older than her actual age-a woman who always looked at Vera with a hint of mockery, as though thinking she could take her in a bar fight. Which she probably could.

"I have a paper in my box from a student," Vera said. "I'm just wondering how it got in there since students don't have access to the lounge."

"Beats me," Eileen said.

School had ended only fifteen minutes before. Many students were still in the halls. Vera took off from the lounge and sped through the corridors, garnering looks from the students she pa.s.sed; panting, she ran up and down the rows of lockers on all three flights of the school, searching for Jensen Willard. She was nowhere to be found.

Chapter Seven.

On Friday, Jensen Willard was absent from Vera's cla.s.s. She was absent again on the following Monday, and by the time Wednesday rolled around, she was still a no-show. This was cause for concern. Per the Wallace School's policy, any student who missed four consecutive school days was the recipient of a check-in from the attendance office-a phone call asking when she planned to return. Vera had been contemplating an informal check-in of her own, but she could not bring herself to email the girl. Her drafts folder was already full of unfinished queries she could not and would not send-drafts that ranged from accusatory ("Why did you put that journal in my mailbox? What do you know about me?") to appropriately concerned ("Your comments worry me. Do you need someone to talk to?").

She knew it was fear that prohibited her from sending them. Not fear of Jensen Willard specifically-she didn't like to think she was becoming afraid of the girl-but fear of the girl's mental state, which she saw as something quite separate.

Her quandary was solved when Sue MacMasters came by on Wednesday afternoon and said, "I need you to send me the last few days' homework a.s.signments for one of your students." She paused to look at the name written down on her clipboard. "Jensen Willard. Her mother called the school office and requested that all her teachers send the work."

"Is Jensen all right?"

"Sick," Sue said briskly. "Though her mother did say she's on the mend. Specifically, she's started sitting up again and drinking tea."

"Sounds like a bad flu, maybe?" Vera kept her tone mild. She did not want Sue to see that the mere mention of Jensen Willard rattled her. Vera took out her notebook and started writing down the past few days' readings and written a.s.signments. "I'll make a list of the missing a.s.signments and see that Jensen gets them. If you do happen to speak to her mother again, send my wishes for a speedy recovery."

"Oh, I don't take phone calls like that. Are you kidding? That's Eileen's job."

Vera's cla.s.ses, minus Jensen, resumed their discussions of The Catcher in the Rye, which was finally winding down to its last chapters. The girls seemed confused by Holden's low spirits and compromised physical health, unsure of what to make of the novel's penultimate chapter when Holden is nearly in tears while watching his little sister, Phoebe, go round and round on the Central Park carousel.

"I don't see why he'd get all worked up about that," Kelsey Smith said. "Little kids ride on carousels all the time."

"They do," Vera said. "That's just it. Haven't you ever had a moment where something ordinary strikes you as extraordinary? Where something ordinary seems wonderfully beautiful or wonderfully sad?"

When Kelsey shook her head, Vera had to stop and process that for a moment. How was it possible to not be struck by such things? "Maybe in time you will" was all she could say to the girl, moving past her seat.

"It says in the last chapter that he ended up getting sick," Jamie Friedman said. "But he's talking to a psychoa.n.a.lyst . . . Is he in like a mental hospital or a regular hospital?"

"It isn't made explicitly clear. Most readers a.s.sume he is in a psychiatric facility, but one might argue that he could be in a sanitarium of some kind for his physical health. Whatever the case, he is receiving psychiatric treatment."

"But he was happy right before the last chapter," Aggie Hamada said worriedly, as though happiness and sadness could not coexist or follow each other in close succession.